Video Artist on Pause, Prodigies in Play

Video art was originally prized in the 1960s for being innovative and for obscuring the boundaries among film, documentary, theater, confession and performance art. Traditionally a nonnarrative, nonlinear genre born of and driven by advances in technology, it is now expected to be nonsensical, even obtuse; to exist in a perpetually free-form state of nowheresville. A few pioneering artists, including Bruce Nauman,...